Our study on the politics of language in @polstudies.bsky.social looks at how terms like woke get strategically transformed and weaponized.

Lab members Ting Cui and Eva Janairo examined the effect of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric on media coverage. They show that words like "criminal", "murderer", and "invasion" spiked in his first term and never went down to pre-Trump levels. www.mediaandminorities.org/immigration/

The last of my lab's three-part series on media coverage of DEI is by Eva Janairo and YiJun Kim. They examine what happens when "DEI scandals" hit the news. They show the real costs to men and women of color who are stigmatized as "DEI hires". www.mediaandminorities.org/DEIscandals/

Interesting research on what exactly happened with DEI and its framing and representation in the media to end up where we are now, by a research project led by @erikbleich.bsky.social, with whom I first studied about race and ethnicity, all those years ago.

The second in my lab's series on DEI is by Andrey Cao and Ting Cui. They look at which groups are linked with DEI in the media. Race/ethnicity are mentioned far more than religion or disability--Black Americans most of all. Discussions of DEI are attached to some groups more than to others.

BREAKING: ICE raided a home with 20 armed agents, ripped a mom & her 3 daughters out of bed in their underwear, held them in the rain for hours at gunpoint—with ZERO charges. They’re U.S. citizens. This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s state-sanctioned terror.

No other democracy has electoral institutions that make the least informed individuals in randomly important geographic locations the pivotal voters. This isn't a problem of democracy. It's a problem of single member districts, presidentialism/Electoral College, and statehood/federalism.

My Media Portrayals of Minorities Project lab is analyzing coverage of DEI in US newspapers in three contributions over the coming days. Here, Daniza Tazabekova and Abby Ward explore how DEI became embroiled in the culture wars between 2020 and 2024: www.mediaandminorities.org/DEIhistory/

There seems to be a conspiracy to make people mad online, cause @whstancil.bsky.social keeps being right. Opinion and politics in the social media age is increasingly just social construction and peer validation.

"the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done"

‘Competitive authoritarianism is a political system where elections occur, but the ruling party uses state power to unfairly disadvantage opposition parties, making the competition real but not fair.’

At this rate MAGA will only be able to afford to rent the libs.

A new high: 62% chance of a recession this year. For no reason. A self-inflicted wound. Basically Trump is Cheddar Bob waving a gun around and shooting himself in the ****.

A reminder that B2 level French is advanced intermediate level. It is of course good to master the language as well as possible, but requiring applicants for naturalisation to speak, listen and write at this level means that you're basically selecting by educational background.

Over 80K people currently watching on Youtube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCUK...

💥🇭🇺 Police have given up guarding Budapest’s Liberty Bridge as anti-government protesters shut down traffic on four major bridges, rallying against Viktor Orbán’s new law curbing freedom of assembly and banning the Pride march. They vow to escalate with a 24-hour shutdown next week.

Booker: "I confess that I have been imperfect. I confess that I've been inadequate to the moment. I've confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say 'we will do better.'"

what booker is doing right now is an example of what i mean when i say things like “we need more ambition right now.” there is room in american politics right now for people with ambition to take big stands and reap the rewards. he’s doing it!

Another cowardly institution bends the knee

To his great credit

Nyhan's leadership lesson for university presidents and law firm partners - don't be Lando cc: @harvard.edu

Now that’s how you do it. Bravo @wilmerhale.bsky.social! Also that’s big law speak for “we’re going to kick your ass to hell and back and smile while doing it”

I keep watching this clip with something approaching yearning and I’m realizing it’s because we don’t hear this level of strategic realism—that the old world is gone and the old rules don’t apply—from anyone in leadership in the Democratic Party.

Really feel like I’m losing my mind: government OBVIOUSLY cannot punish an individual law firm for hiring someone it disfavors! It’s ludicrously unconstitutional and I feel like without a day of law school I could argue the case. And yet the best paid lawyers in the country are folding?

This feels like an opportunity for Canada or the UK to grant this scientist asylum.

Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over."

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/n... Thank you @pagefortna.bsky.social and your colleagues for standing up for Columbia and for us all.

I guess I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. Fuck decorum. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-f...

Europe races to lure U.S. scientists as Trump puts pressure on universities. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Read this and weep. 😭 🤯

This ad in today’s Chronicle. Smart governments in rich liberal democracies can pick up great researchers on the cheap.

It would be bad enough to see your country destroyed by an evil genius. But an evil moron, that's just embarrassing.

Even if you think Paul Weiss and Columbia made the only choice available to them in the circumstances (and that's not what I think, to be clear), you have to recognize that there's no future for our democracy if every powerful institution approaches official extortion in this way.

A lot of folks are sharing this and it is misinformationally captioned. He did not say "take Greenland," he said "take more territorial interest in Greenland". Which is deeply concerning. But not the same.

It requires a special combination of malice and incompetence to make Canada and Denmark into America's enemies.

Lando's leadership of Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back turned out to be a tragically prescient parable for our time. Leaders of institutions: Pay attention! A story in four parts. cc: Paul Weiss, Columbia University bcc: all law firms, universities, and civil society organizations

Hey academic friends — universities need to stand together in the face of this onslaught. Please help mobilize your faculties, boards of trustees, etc to get your university’s leadership to stand with those already getting hit. Hiding won’t work. They are coming for you next.

Why does it take a French Senator to say this out loud? Where are his American counterparts? youtube.com/watch?v=QIK9...

We are now accepting nominators for the CES 2025 Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award. Nominations for the 2025 Award are due May 2, 2025: councilforeuropeanstudies.org/membership/g...

Curious about how the world will end? Feel free to check out my presentation with Middlebury Classics colleague Chris Star: vimeo.com/1056150082?s..., based on our Conversation contribution: theconversation.com/how-apocalyp.... Perhaps a more timely topic than ever... 🫤

Brand new PLOS ONE article with @amauritsvdv.bsky.social. If you are interested in sentiment analysis, have a look. We make the case for lexicon-based approaches for social science work.

Two super-innovative designs: "The first experiment shows how racial discrimination accumulates across multiple rounds of hiring" "essentially all of the gender discrimination in hiring rates and wages was driven by systemic disparities from recommendation letter language"

From @theathleticfc.bsky.social: A dramatic finish completed a Cinderella run for Vermont, which finished the season ranked 17th and went on to win its first men's NCAA soccer championship. nyti.ms/3ZVGl9K

A poll that mostly measures positive associations of terms. What would be much more interesting is to see what people understand these terms to mean.

While many social scientists work to find the perfectly identified causal estimate, many important non-causal questions are left unanswered. “How many?” “How often?”